CTID: TEXT WALLS

”The thing I’m going to talk about in this part of my series of Comic Things I Dislike often appears with the ’talking heads’ phenomenon mentioned earlier, though of course not always. What I’m referring to here is text walls which means that the panels are filled with way too much text.” //
”As I said, ’talking heads’ and text walls quite often appear together, and there is one very good reason for this. They come from the same place and same kind of need. Often, not every time.” //
”What I mean here is the comic maker’s need to talk about something, tell their opinion or explain some abstract concept, not so much the want or need to tell about something that has happened.” //
”One easily falls victim to a text wall if one has important things to say about something that is difficult to draw about. However, most comic creators try to avoid making text wall comics. And for a good reason, too. Text walls are mostly considered pretty boring as they make reading the comic painstaking and slow.” //
”Sometimes it is a good idea for a comic maker to ask themselves if it is necessary to make a comic about some topic just because they’re used to do so. Maybe it is better to just write about certain things if they don’t make good comics.” //
”Because text wall comics often aren’t visually that interesting…” //
”…as the text by definition fills most of the panel. If you still want to make that comic, think first about which things are the most important ones to say.” //
”If your character has plenty to say… you can divide their lines into more than one speech bubble. Then the text wall doesn’t look that bad.” //
”Or you can bring in another character with whom to discuss the topic. A dialogue is often much more interesting in comics than a monologue, and like in real life conversation, in a dialogue the lines naturally stay shorter.” ”Could you please let me talk here, too?”